Director Joe Carnahan of "The Grey" says the Wolves Win, but Do They?

Just as California gets its
first wild wolf in almost 80 years, along comes “The Grey,” the new
thriller opening Jan. 27 in which Liam Neeson leads a bunch of very
out-of-place oilfield dudes in Alaska who are hunted and killed by
wolves.Upside: Nature wins. Downside: Wild wolves are portrayed as
cunning man-eaters. Maybe bad timing for our new wolf, known by the
designation OR-7.

“It’s fictional. That kind of movie is
completely designed for thrill and does not reflect reality,” says Kim
Delfino, California program director at Defenders of Wildlife, whose
group has taken a keen interest in OR-7. “It’s highly, highly unusual
for wolves to ever attack people.”

Carnahan himself wants the
wolves to be seen in the right light. Talking by phone and email from
Toronto, he says: “I never intended [the wolves] to be the aggressor; I
look at them as the defenders. I think these guys are in a very
territorially sensitive place. [The humans] were trespassing and
intruders.”

Aggressors or defenders, these wolves are taking no
shorts. A few minutes into the movie we see why Neeson’s character,
Ottway, is there: As men work on a pipeline in a rugged snowy landscape,
a big gray wolf comes streaking in out of the storm at astonishing
speed to attack the men, and Ottway guns it down. The threat is
established: These wolves are on the offensive.

“I am absolutely
an animal activist and have a dog and three horses, and this was never
in any way to suggest that wolves are vicious animals,” said Carnahan.
“But they are part of nature, but they’re not different in the movie
from the blizzard, from the river, from the cliffside. For all its
beauty, it’s also very hostile and unforgiving.”

Indeed, from the
very first scene, the Alaskan sky is always dark, the snow is howling, a
river half-frozen and opaque. Carnahan, who also co-wrote the movie
with Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, makes the environment into a character
ruthlessly hostile to humans.

On a flight home, the snow takes
down a plane full of the oilfield roughnecks. All but seven are killed.
The very first night, the wolves appear, and, one by one, the men are
picked off. Ottway, who is a wildlife biologist stationed with the men
for their protection, has a special relationship with the pack,
especially the alpha, and the ensuing hunt is clearly personal for both
man and wolf.

Carnahan says he learned a lot about wolves from the
books of Shaun Ellis, who lived as a low-ranking member of a Rocky
Mountain wolf pack for 18 months, eating off their kills and studying
their behavior. He also spent a considerable amount of the time with the
real wolves used in the film, which were trained by legendary animal
wrangler Gerry Therrien. That pack was dominated by an alpha female who,
Carnahan says, was fierce about keeping the others in line.

These
oilfield characters are not men we like. That was deliberate, Carnahan
says, as he meant to point out that industries like petroleum extraction
are often interlopers in pristine — if hostile — environments. Very
quickly, the behavior of the survivors devolves into a snarling pack,
with the men fighting for dominance. The wolves are imbued with more
dignity.

In one key scene, the men manage to kill a wolf, and one
of the least-likable characters, Diaz, mutilates it and throws out a
challenge to the wolves, saying, “You’re not the animals, we’re the
animals!” This elicits a chilling response from the wolves, who send up a
rising howl from the dark in which all we see is their breath
illuminated by moonlight.

Which is an indication of how it’s going
to go. The wolves are better adapted. Carnahan says to anyone who
thinks he has demonized the wolves: “Look, the wolves do OK in the
movie. If it was a football game it would be like 41 to 3! [laughs] They
do all right.”

Defenders of Wildlife and many other animal
advocates hope that California will celebrate having a wild wolf.
Carnahan feels his film also has an environmental message.

"I
don't think the film will make people fear wolves, but I'd like to make
them respect wolves and by extension, nature itself more,” he says. “I'd
like the movie to remind people that we're just visitors here, and the
defiling and destruction of the natural world puts us at odds with our
environment and we're ultimately provoking a power that is supreme,
overwhelming and merciless. Look no further than the tsunami that struck Japan for an example of exactly how ferocious nature can be."

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone